Archive for January 2009

Welcome to our online guide to this week’s best US television shows. We will be listing links to some UK shows too, like the addictive Celebrity Big Brother. While the events in the Big Brother house are screened live on various justin.tv sites, sitcoms, crime shows etc will usually appear on the web the day after they are broadcast.

Monday night wouldn’t be the same without the frothy teen drama Gossip Girl. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s like a PG version of the movie Cruel Intentions. In this week’s episode ‘Gone With the Will,’ bad boy Chuck Bass continues his downward spiral.

Also on Monday, the delightful comedy How I Met Your Mother continues. HIMYM, stars former Doogie Howser actor Neil Patrick Harris as the roguish womaniser Barney and perky American Pie cutie Alyson Hannigan as his crazy pal. For newcomers, it’s like an edgy version of nineties sitcom Friends.

Tuesday night’s episode of The Mentalist, “Red Rum” sees Patrick Jane move one step closer to finding information on the serial killer Red John. For newbies, The Mentalist is about a psychic detective who isn’t really a psychic. And, believe it or not, no it is not a rip-off of the quirky USA channel series Psych.

Thursday night is usually the best evening for entertaining TV. Grey’s Anatomy, featuring Patrick Dempsey as Dr. McDreamy, and its spin-off Private Practice, starring Kate Walsh, continue to get decent viewing figures, while Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin do their thing in clever comedy 30 Rock. We also quite like Kath and Kim, with Selma Blair, which isn’t nearly as bad as everyone says it is.

Then Friday features the delicious double bill on the USA channel of Monk and Psych. People in both the US and the UK will also be anxiously tuning in that day to see who is next to get booted out of the Celebrity Big Brother house. We hope it’s Tina. Sadly the original link toBig Brother Live has been taken down for copyright infringement but we will try to find a new one in time for the eviction.

Tip1: if you register an account with Sidereel.com, you can add all your favourite shows to your profile and it will automatically tell you when new episodes appear.

Tip2: newcomers should probably check out the old episodes of shows listed first. Otherwise it won’t make a whole lot of sense. Both SurftheChannel and Sidereel keep an excellent archive. In Sidereel, click “Search for results” at the bottom of each episode listing.

If you know of working links to UK content like EastEnders, Match of the Day etc, please email LarryMilk@topdollarnews.com.

Telly shrink Gabriel Byrne recently found himself an unpaid job – teaching Frasier’s crusty old dad to sound more Irish. Byrne, who plays a psychiatrist in edgy series In Treatment, stepped in to help when his veteran co-star John Mahoney was cast in Colin McPherson‘s play “The Seafarer,” on Broadway.

Mahoney (pictured above) – best known for playing the grumpy dad in another TV shrink show, Frasier – is a proud Irish American himself but he had no idea how to do a Dublin accent. In between takes for In Treatment, Mahoney would chat with Dublin-born Byrne paying close attention to the lilt of his voice. Byrne even taped himself reading lines from Mahoney’s script of “The Seafarer.”

“I have a lot of Irish in me but this really helps,” says Mahoney, who was born in England and had an Irish grandfather but lost his accent when he emigrated to the US. Referring to his role in the play, at New York’s Steppenwolf Theatre, Mahoney says: “I play a filthy old drunk, recently blind, chronically hung over.

A blockbuster wartime bio-pic faces the axe – after it was revealed the New Yorker who wrote it made the whole story up! Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss and Irish starlet Sarah Bolger were set to make “The Fence” – based on an autobiography by Herman Rosenblat.

In the movie, Dublin-born beauty Bolger plays Roma, a young girl who forms a bond with teenage Nazi concentration camp victim Rosenblat after she keeps him alive by tossing him breadcrumbs and apples over the barbed wire fence.

However, Rosenblat, who went on to marry Roma following a chance meeting years later in New York, has now shockingly confessed he concocted the information in his book, “Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived.”

Retired New York telly repairman Herman, whose bogus story has now been scrapped by publishers, apologised this week, saying: “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”

Even chat show queen Oprah Winfrey was taken in by the hoax. Oprah who hosted Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their romance “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her 22 years on the show.

He’s one of the most popular political figures of all time, but a new book will trash the reputation of America’s favourite president John F Kennedy and portray him as a sex fiend.

The bombshell new book “American Adulterer,” by British writer Jed Mercurio, ignores Kennedy’s political accomplishments and focuses instead on his daily addiction to illicit sex sessions with beautiful starlets like Marilyn Monroe, Angie Dickinson and Judith Campbell Exner. And the page turner, billed as a work of fiction, is set to spark outrage among the powerful Kennedy Clan, who are regarded as America’s own royal family.

Publishers Simon & Schuster say American Adulterer, released this July, is an “explosive retelling of Kennedy’s White House years,” a period in which “we see him at his worst, as a compulsive philanderer. “Kennedy had an uncontrollable and unrelenting appetite for sexual adventure.”

JFK’s daughter Caroline Kennedy, who is hoping to follow in her father’s illustrious footsteps by becoming a New York senator, has so far not commented on the forthcoming book.

He’s been on our screens for five decades – but Irish actor Stephen Rea says the characters he plays never gets any nookie! The closest he came to getting lucky was in his Oscar-nominated movie The Crying Game and the female ‘love interest’ in that film turned out to be a cross-dressing MAN!

However, Rea – one of the busiest stars in Hollywood – claims he is happy never getting the girl. “Can you imagine having to do all that sex in a film?” says 62-year-old Rea. “Sex in movies is not fun. There’s a lot of people watching, your butt is in the air, it’s not the most fun. You will be much happier if you don’t see my butt in the air, believe me.”

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